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A Case for Linux in the Corporation
_UnderTow_ writes: "Saw this over at Anandtech. It's a pretty descriptive account of a reasonably large corporation (7000+ employees) transitioning their network infrastructure over to Red Hat Linux. Has details of the company's initial move to NT, and their eventual move to Linux as the cost of licensing gets out of control."
I didn't switch to linux because someone told me too, I switched because I needed an alternative OS. This is a good sign of things to come. Build a better OS, and people will come. Of course, it helps that Microsoft enforces license policies that soak consumers for every penny they're worth and even corporation who WANT to be legal are unsure of their licensing. The more Microsoft starts bullying people around, the more enticing free software becomes. If Microsoft ever stoops to the level of leased OS's there will be a whole lot more stories like this one.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Before you flame me, read this whole article. This is a fairy tale of linux winning over microsoft. Not that it couldn't (or didn't) happen, it's just that the author presents it in such a format as to make it unbelievable. Did anyone else get that same impression?
There are thousand cases of Linux uses in corporates (large and smaller ones as well) on MandrakeBizCases.com. Worth a look.
What's missing are any verifiable facts. Until any are presented this article goes in the round file -- i.e.: somebody's pipe dream of the way Linux should help.
All of the major vendors list the company name with most case studies -- it is common practice. Who is the company? Is their third party verification of the reported shift?
It could happen -- it might have happened -- it is useless to use this article to sell management on the benefits of open source -- this has few if any real details.
Please, please present some factual and verifiable accounts that can be used in making OS decisions!
I don't care if you never implement a Linux/*BSD box, or if you think Linux is the biggest piece of crap to ever be installed on a computer. The simple fact that its an alternative to NT (and one that, as this article shows, can be done piecemeal) is good for the industry. It keeps MS honest. As an IT director you have one hell of a bargining chip at your disposal. You still may go with MS tech, but at least you can do it with some leverage on the licensing terms.
Simply comparing the Microsoft platform with the closest Linux-based counterpart should give some indication of the reasons that Linux is seen in some circles as a viable alternative to the aforementioned platform.
The cost of Windows 2000 Server is upwards of $1000 dollars / copy plus the huge cost of additional programs such as the BackOffice suite and SQL Server Enterprise Edition. A Linux Server distribution costs you once and you can distribute that single copy to as many machines as you desire. In addition, quality tools such as PostgreSQL, php, perl, python and apache are not only free for the taking but enjoy a huge, worldwide development community of devoted users who churn out improvements, tips and free software.
The Windows code base is proprietary and closed source while Linux kernel code is open-sourced and modifiable under a fairly generous license.
If you have Windows, your operating systems support is generally beholden to one company that has been shown to be monopolistic, self-centered and concerned mostly with the profiteering rather than quality software. With Linux, there are options ranging from homegrown support and development to support by the first IT company, IBM and into small support-oriented shops such as Red Hat and VA Linux. In addition, one can choose from a range of different distributions according to organizational needs. Witness the recent adoption of Linux by animation studios as a platform for development.
The majority of Windows software is closed-source and expensive, while most Linux-ware is free and open-source.
Linux, configured correctly, is a relatively secure operating system, while Windows has been shown to have basic flaws in its security mechanisms.
So there is more than just some wordplay going-on. Linux seems to have certain advantages that the major competition lacks.
I don't know if the story is true or not, anyone know of a Washington State corporation with 7000 users that recently made the switch? I am from the area and am not aware of anything of that maginitude.
But, fairy tale nature aside, the article does show how big companies can get trapped in the licensing whirlpool. It used to be that no-on got fired for buying IBM. Now it is Microsoft that cannot do wrong. But even that is changing and companies that need to look hard at their bottom line should take note!
So I find this to be good ammunition for me as my fledgeling company starts to sell GNU/Linux-based business solutions. Of course my target market isn't companies with 7000 employees; more like 70 to 700. But I need all the bullet points I can make even with them.
So thanks for this posting!
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
...this would be a very interesting article.
As it stands, it's just annoying. How do we know how much is true, and how much is embellished (or even pure fantasy?)
I was about to pass it along to a colleague but decided not too. It's just TOO unverifiable.
I happen to be a Mac user with very little personal or professional involvement in either WIndows NT or LINUX.
While this analysis details very niceley what MS charged for service, the writer completely left out what RedHat charges, in this case or even generally.
Could someone with experience post some figures?
How long will RedHat be involved in providing service for a company they have switched to Linux. If all goes so smooth, why not hire an experienced sysadmin inside, why outsorcing?
Whoa. You have 24,000 mail accounts on imail. Question: Where is the mail stored? Sure, you have possibly thousands of new messages on your box. But all your clients are downloading their mail to their client. So where is the load? Exchange keeps all the mail ON THE SERVER. So, your 24,000 mail users would have MILLIONS of messages and file attachments kept on one set of drives. And every time they look at a message, instead of the client handling all the work, the Exchange server does most of it. Big difference, so don't make it sound like 24,000 mail accounts is a big deal, when its all POP3.
Articles like this and other such as the ones over at http://www.mandrakebizcases.com/ are exactly what Corporate America (and the world) needs to see and hear if Linux is going to really make inroads in corporate america. Corporations don't look at the logo on their computer that shows up when they boot, they look at the bottom line in their spreadsheet.
Nosce te Ipsum
One of the main reason I have heard time and time again for companies not switching to another lower TCO OS (MacOS, some open source Unix) is the cost of retraining. Here, MS, clearly made the cost of ownership HIGHER than the cost of retraining and a company noticed it. Now, after MS tries to move everyone to .NET and owning a WinTel computer requires annual fees, don't you think more companies will move away from Windows?
Burn Hollywood Burn
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to MS Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 10,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for RedHat (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux has a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone has a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
The server may have been a little taxed, handling 7,000 e-mail accounts on a single pentium box may stress it a little, but other than e-mail taking a little longer to send the end users won't notice
I don't thing the box would've been taxed that badly... I once worked for a company that had 3500 email accounts on a single cpu, Pentium Pro 150Mhz machine with only 64MB ram and running FreeBSD and it did just fine. We typically had 1800-2000 concurrent users getting their mail via POP3 from that box at any given time during the business day. I can imagine a modern P-III or Xeon box pushing close to a GHz speed and hundreds of MB's of today's cheap memory with fast Ultra160SCSI disks running Linux or FreeBSD could handle thousands of simultaneous IMAP/POP users with ease.
I've noticed that a lot of posters to this thread seem to have the opinion that article is a fairy tale. Anandtech seems to me to have a reputation for impartiality, their hardware reveiws are quite thourough and unbiased as far as I can see.
I took the article at face value because all of the other stuff I've read at anand's has been good qualtiy unbiased reporting. There are plenty of reasons why the writer wouldn't want to name the corporation. Maybe he works there.
While I feel Microsoft's software is substantially better than any solution one could deploy with Linux, I do feel their licensing structures have gotten entirely out of hand in recent years.
Competition on this level will cause Microsoft to revisit their pricing and become more competitive. Essentionally causing the same thing to happen to MS as MS caused to Sun, Novell, Oracle, etc. when they came in and undercut those companies by half or more.
look it up, its called RIS and works under win2k. you set up one server and install all the software and needed changes. now you start a win2k install on any box and point it to the server. its installed exactly to your liking. most companies just use a hard drive blaster anyway. check out this doc for more info
. as p
http://www.microsoft.com/ISN/whitepapers/p56782
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Microsoft has been faced with the task of trying to make NT all things to all people. In doing so, they have not been able to devote as many resources to security as they would have liked, and as a result, NT has proven to be less secure than originally hoped for
If thats not the nicest way to say that Microsoft has serious security issues, I don't know what is.
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
While it seems quite true that linux may be a very good alternative to NT given Microsoft's extravagant prices, what if cost is not really an issue, like in university enviornments? Where I currently work, we can get most MS software at a very drastic discount (Office and 2000 pro are nearly free), so price does not really come into play. Do I think we should use Liunx? Of course, but price isn't necessairly the issue when chosing software.
"we will use an example based upon the experiences of a corporation with a presence in Washington State."
That company wouldn't be in REDMOND, would it?
(Oh, the _irony_!)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
This reads *exactly* like what my life was like, late '97 to late '99. Uglier and uglier NT network (we had roughly 35 NT domains with only 2000 users), more and more fragile services (mostly mail and printing because our file serving was from NetWare), higher and higher costs (and more and more time) to get anything done.
I kept suggesting Linux (yes, back then). I even setup a non-crashing backup print server--but I was the only one who used it regularly (of course, everybody used it about twice a week....). Unfortunately three factors worked against me:
1) Linux wasn't quite as big then as it is now.
2) The network admin was nearly techno-illiterate. She could do the stuff she had been trained to in a couple of NT classes but nothing else. Linux scared her. And she wasn't the kind of person to educate herself to conquer fear--her method was to insult and ignore the source.
3) We were about 1 hour from Redmond. It's hard to shield yourself from The Presence when you are that close.
324006
Specialized applications are what keeps the NT market alive. Outlook and office keeps windows in the desktop, servers are tied to specialized software that is not readily available. (Manufacturing, customer facing products, back end support, etc.)
Most specialized programs have been in development on NT. The NT versions are older and have more features. I work for a Telco, and most vendors only have an NT port of their software. Unix or (Linux) versions are planned but would you trust your customers on an initial software release that hasn't even been tested in a production environment?
If you have the in-house developers and the time to write an application from scratch, Unix is the best choice. If you don't, your stuck on relying on what the software market provides.
What has been tested and works perfectly is the most common services Unix performs out of the box, File, Print and Internet services. There should be no reason you would use an M$ server for any of these services. (Well, maybe Exchange server, but that's debatable...)
Seems like common sense here, use the right tool for the right job. I wouldn't buy a gold-plated hammer from m$ to use on a 1 cent nail.
24k accounts on exchange?
:) ...
Bullshit...
Unless you truly have like 2% usage, exchange
would have croaked long ago.
No i don't admin exchange, but i have seen it croak under an incoming queue of 4k mails on MUCH larger hardware ( compaq 5000R's with raid 5 arrays ), and that's just for the bridge head servers... never mind all the mailbox, and the secondary bridgehead server(s).
How do i know, well, i set up the mail caching infrastructure that sits a step above exchange,
based of course on FreeBSD + Qmail
and it's there because exchaneg can't handle the load...
Exchange has some nifty features, and it's actually the only product "now" in the market that does them, but come on, it's no strong mta...
On another note... that article DOES seem fake...
But not because of the reasons you gave...
I'll get marked down for this post, but the truth has to be said.
The Anandtech article is a hypothetical corporation, not a real one. This is written to sound like a real 'case study' and the tone is distinctly pro-Linux. While that in itself isn't a bad thing, the MS bashing relies on some shaky assertions at times. It would have been a better article if the criticisms stood on more solid footings.
First of all, the assertion that the company would HAVE to move to per-seat licensing when they moved to separate file, print and mail servers is just wrong. 2000 concurrent users are still 2000 concurrent users, whether they are connected to one server or three.
Secondly, the idea that after 'two or three years' the initial two multiprocessor servers should still be adequate for the 2000 concurrent users is ridiculous. I have three-year old servers in my company that, regardless of operating system, are no longer up to the task - the drive capacities are too small, the processors are 1/4 the speed of our newest desktops, and the upgrade paths are exhausted. How is this the fault of the OS?
Next, the author states that "The next couple of years saw a dramatic increase in data storage requirements and internet use", and then goes on to insinuate that the OS was somehow to blame for uptime / reliability of the hardware used. Wha..?
In the same paragraph, the author states that the failure of redundant servers was causing increased maintenance costs, and once again this was somehow caused by NT. First, the multiple servers weren't installed to be redundant - they were installed to handle separate functions, i.e., mail / file / print. What synchronization is required? Secondly, anyone who says that redundancy is somehow bad because there is more equipment to fail, and then blames the added cost of the equipment failure on the operating system, is just nuts.
Well, I think that's enough to get me modded down to -50, but it's the truth. Even fiction should be checked by an editor for factual veracity before publishing.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Clearly, the project managers assigned to this customer from RH did their job: they made the customer a partner...not a take over victim. So many companies say that the customer must do this or that, whether it is MS or some other software developer around the corner. RH came in and gave advice towards solving problems: a rarity in today's high dollar world.
Windows, when configured correctly, is a relatively secure operating system. Not perfect but quite good. If a company is unable to secure windows I would question their ability to secure Linux.
Cost is relative -- and a few k in software costs is an investment that pays back greatly. Wasting thousands of k in rolling out a system that doesn't work is a much, much larger issue -- i.e.: cost of MS Software is an issue but is secondary.
Wow, I can read that in so many ways...
First, I don't buy into the credibility of the story. I want to know hard information about this particular case study. While the generalities of the story rings basically true to my ears (probably because I want it to be true) the absense of referencable specifics make the story factually questionable.
Second, maybe it's just my lack of experience on the matter, but there were some licensing costs there that I never even heard of before. Maybe it's simply because I never bothered to notice. But "I don't buy it" also means that I don't pay for MS's licensing costs so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that Microsoft has been riding on the momentum of accepted piracy for so long and without a doubt, it was intentional. It's like a drug dealer -- get'm hooked and then charge them for it dearly later. Corporate America and hundreds of thousands of IT professionals are frightened to death about the "withdrawls" from Microsoft and like an addicted smoker, they would rather pay the costs of continued use rather than kick a bad habit and do what's best for the "body."
I'm all for MS Windows as a client, to be honest. It works good [enough] for the end user and it's damned easy. And since MS Office enjoys enough corporate ubiquity, it's still potentially damaging to use anything but MS Office where different companies do business together. HOWEVER that has no bearing on the server side which is exactly why it has historically been an easier market to enter. The geniuses behind the SaMBa project are probably the biggest heros in the story of Linux as they enabled something that simply made it all work.
So I'd like to see some follow-up like knowing more specifics such as what company this is, when it happened and such. Who from RedHat can confirm this story?
I want to believe it so badly that I almost do. More importantly, I want something I can use later without looking like a moron unable to answer the practical questions.
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to M$ Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 100,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for R3dH@t (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux had a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone had a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
I am a little interested as to who everyone is so concerned about companies adopting linux? I think I've heard all the arguments: it's good for the Linux community, it's good for the companies(and the economy), it whacks Bill in the balls . . . whatever. But in my opinion, the beauty of Linux lies in the fact that it is used largely by users who want to use it, not those who have to. And it makes no sense to me why you or I should care whether corp X uses Linux, BSD, Windows, or an old Lisp machine unless it personally affects us(through our jobs or investments).
I am not trying to sound elitist -- I am not saying that "those not enlightened enough to use Linux should not." What I am saying, is that mindshare, both in the terms of users and corporations is rather irrelevant. Besides, if you believe that Linux is perfect for everything(and I don't -- my Windows machine is a great equivalent of my Dreamcast), then those corporations who use Linux will have lower costs and a competitive edge, resulting in economic success and in the displacement of Windows using companies. If this is what's happening now with the adoption of Linux, it makes no sense for us to care about it as anything more than a vindication of the OS, and I think there are very few people at Slashdot who need convincing.
What saddens me is the decline of the hacker ethic and the change of emphasis from "Lets make it better so people use it" to "lets yell louder about how good it is so people use it." And what saddens me even more is that I am wasting time writing this and not coding . . . I guess I am being a little hypocritical. But still, I am convinced there is no reason cheer after a company's adoption of Linux and boo after hearing "Windows." The reason people cheer at football games is that they can't come down to the field and help out. Well, in the case of linux, we can.
In fact, the most important thing about the article is the observation that Linux can be adopted piecemeal while Microsoft tends to want you to change all your software, and often much of your hardware, at once. In an economic downturn, the last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money for the chance to take a leap of faith and shift your paradigm. Instead, more evolutionary tactics are called for, which just happens to be what Linux or *BSD is good for.
The use of Linux doesn't promise a radical improvement in the way you do business, but it also doesn't have a lot of the risk associated with a paradigm shift. Companies hedging their bets would do well to at least consider not buying Microsoft.
Hi!
Like others, I'm a bit disturbed by the anonymous "case study" that was presented in this article. I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing who the company is, and some third-party verification that such a change actually took place.
But there's no denying the central argument: Microsoft's licensing fees have dramatically jumped in price, and the terms of their licensing agreements have gotten substantially worse. Yesterday, for instance, I received an email from Microsoft regarding SQL Server licensing. In short, I have till October 1 to upgrade all of my SQL Server 7 licenses to SQL Server 2000--or I lose the right to to "upgrade" price for SQL Server 2000. If I choose to upgrade after October 1 I will have to pay the full retail price.
I'm a big believer in the concept of "don't fix what isn't broken." While the move from SQL Server 7.0 to SQL Server 2000 isn't a big deal (at least for our SS7 applications) I see little reason to spend bucks upgrading server databases that don't need to be changed. But if I need to migrate those down the road, I'll have to pay substantially higher fees--the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later demand from Microsoft just infuriates me.
But the licensing problem gets worse. Microsoft has dramatically raised their prices and dramatically restricted their terms. Case in point: we're starting to develop a project for a small startup non-profit organization. This is a group that does physical therapy on horseback for handicapped kids--they used to be part of Easter Seals, but Easter Seals has dropped them. (Long, sad story.) They're on their own, and they need to get organized. We want to help them (we're working pro bono publico) and we're recommending a "virtual office" concept. Don't build/buy/rent an office building: instead, let volunteers and paid staff function from home. Manage the office functions in a web application, handle the phones with call forwarding and related telephony stuff, and so forth--it's the 21st century, and there's lots of cool things we can do to hold costs down so program funds can be focused on kids and horses.
Sounds great, right? Except--we run right smack into Microsoft licensing. We're a Microsoft shop--and part of the benefit of doing pro bono projects like this is the hands-on experience we get with new development tools. This would be the perfect project for Microsoft's dot-Net technologies. That is, until we go live--and have to pay $2500 per processor for the server license for the OS, and another $2500 per processor for the SQL Server 2000 license. I'm entirely willing to develop the site for Equi-Librium pro bono--I am also willing to pay Microsoft a reasonable fee for the software we'll use. But five thousand U.S. currency one-dollar simolians is most definitely not a reasonable fee.
So this lets-all-get-experience project may well get done with PHP, PostgreSQL, and FreeBSD. And when we're done we'll have experience with a bunch of non-Microsoft tools, and we may have a different answer for clients who want scaleable applications but can't (or don't want to) pay Microsoft's fees.
Despite the propaganda, Microsoft didn't win the PC wars by skullduggery or deceit. They won by targetting the "influential end user" (their words) and providing lots of information. Software consultants are precisely the kind of people that Microsoft has depended upon, and we've been a very loyal Microsoft shop. We've benefitted enormously from the Microsoft Developer Network program, and we've steered a lot of clients to Microsoft-based solutions (and thus Microsoft operating systems) over the years. But Microsoft's pricing, and licensing, and upgrade policies have us--among the most loyal of Microsoft loyalists--actively questioning our relationship to them.
John Murdoch
Wind Gap Technology Group
Isn't that the final irony that the biggest wealthiest and some would say most sophisticated companies will be the biggest consumers of NT-2K-XP while everyone else just gets by with fast good reliable stable safe open source. Fortune 500 firms will be able to afford all the convolutions of Windows code and will smugly assume that they're getting the best bang for the buck. They're not that sensitive to support costs so they'll be fat dumb and happy. Smaller firms, nonprofits and the like will use anything but Windows code.
But the biggest irony of all will be that MS will finally be an enterprise provider not because their stuff is any good but because large companies can afford it.
If you would read the article it seems to me that only the company name is missing, the rest seems fine with me. It also does not say that it removed all the M$ products and went to pure linux. In fact it doesn't even come close to that.
Its no different that any news corporation doing a story and holding back the name of the company. It all depends on how trustworthy you find the source.
If you stopped to read the rest of my comment, I also said that our machine here at the office has an uptime of 80+ days right now (last downtime was for a hardware upgrade). In fact, I just checked with the admin and he has never had a crash of that server. All downtime was hardware related.
That's also an interesting point for NT4. Apparently all BSOD's are NT's fault. So if a 3rd party driver shit all over itself, NT's apparently at fault. NT must BSOD in these instances because you don't know what else the driver shit on, and killing drivers is not a great idea. NT got a very bad rep for that when it's wasn't totally their fault.
And it was 3 machines + 3 backups. Thus 7000 users (AFAIK) over 3 machines is 2333/machine, because the backups are used if something goes wrong.
If God gave us curiosity
I currently work for a company that is "on the cusp" of a decision similar to what the article described. We just paid out a bunch of money for OfficeXP (for a couple of reasons) and now some of the more Microsoft-inclined persons at my company are quietly screaming for Exchange 2000. And of course, all of the neato features in Exchange 2000 require Active Directory, and Active Directory requires MS DNS, etc. The handwriting is plainly on the wall. I thought I remember reading that Novell is considering giving away (as in gratis) NDS. I checked their website yesterday and downloaded a copy of it for Linux.
Anyone running NDS on Linux? Good / bad?
Anytime you add or change a network of any size, you MUST test; you MUST train. Test networks are a good thing; and need to be used, if you company relys on it's networks, you need to test any change first.
Gee I guess if you don't change your network ever; you will never have to get any training either, right?
"think of it as evolution in action"
Yes, but corporate America needs to read this, with more facts and figures in the Wall Street Journal.
/. nor anandtech.
The folks who make those decisions don't read
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
The article seems to start out describing how this company converted their Windows network to Linux (but that's implied, not explicit). At the end, however, it seems that they're still using Windows. They didn't buy the upgrades Microsoft was trying to sell them, and I think they're using Linux for some services (see page 6), but it's not clearly stated.
The analysis of the costs of NT and the advantages of Linux seems plausible, but the article is written so that the implied claims are a lot stronger than the details of what actually happened.
Great comment. It seems to me that GNU/Linux has many advantages not normally discussed. Your comment begins to show more of the potential advantages.
Also, Windows has many disdvantages most people don't understand. For example, with Microsoft Windows there is a potential of unrepairable operating system corruption. Microsoft Windows has a file called the registry (SYSTEM.DAT) that often becomes damaged and unrepairable. Below is a message copied without change from a Microsoft error display. As you read it, please keep in mind that registry damage is extremely common.
Registry Repair Results
Windows found an error in your system files and was unable to fix the problem. Try deleting some files to free up disk space on your Windows drive. If that doesn't work then you will need to install Windows to a new directory.
The computer with the bad registry has gigabytes of free disk space. "Installing Windows to a new directory" also means re-installing ALL the applications, and driver updates, and so on. "Installing Windows to a new directory" is equivalent to re-formatting your hard disk and starting over. This is not file system corruption, which is easily fixed. This is unrepairable operating system corruption.
Please also realize that this is only one of MANY such issues.
One reason to use GNU/Linux is that it is of much higher quality. Linux doesn't seem to have the same vulnerabilities as Windows. I don't think there is a Linux message that says, "The corruption is too great to repair. You will have to install everything again."
Why does Microsoft use a single file for most configuration information? Apparently Microsoft uses this as a method of copy protection. A user can copy a program's files, but the program will not operate without the registry entries. Unfortunately for Microsoft Windows users, this single file can become corrupted by a buggy application. If the corruption is great enough, the entire operating system becomes corrupted and unusable and unrepairable.
Bush's education improvements were
Just a thought, but configuring Windows for security might mean ripping out the guts of the operating system if you talk to some noted security experts . Microsoft products have recently shown major insecurities in their fundamental operation; IIS buffer overflow and unauthorized program execution errors in the code that accepts URL's is a fundamental flaw that Apache, AFAIK, has not been vulnerable to on even close to the same level or frequency.
I totally agree with your last point but does this necessarily come down to operating system choice? Desktop software surely limits Linux on that end, but for mid to low-demand internet applications, Linux is a superior, cheaper option. This site , widely considered by many developers as one of the best on the internet, was created using free tools such as perl and php, not Microsoft technologies.
Technological success (not economic, which is a whole other issue) is more a function of the quality of your software and the skill of the support/operating personnel. A Linux roll-out without proper support, money and forethought will certainly cause major problems, but ditto for Microsoft.
Umm...
You didn't read the article did you? It specifically mentions that they were using Win9x. Win9x can NOT be a secure OS.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I couldn't disagree with you more. Many pundits think that the reason that Linux is being installed is due to the fact that it is more stable or more secure, or more whatever. The pundits couldn't be more wrong. The real reason that Linux gets installed is that for many uses it is "good enough" and the price is right.
If you have some monster database, and that database costs you one grillion dollars every second that it isn't available, then you bust out your checkbook and pay for Oracle and a pile of the best Oracle DBAs you can find. However, most folks can get by with much less than the very best, and increasingly folks are shopping around. Paying a premium for software features that you don't need and won't use is stupid.
For example, in one of my projects I needed a database, not a fancy database, but something a step up from Access. Microsoft wanted me to go with SQL Server, but instead I spent the extra time to learn how to administer PostgreSQL. That extra time was time well spent. I now have several PostgreSQL databases deployed, with a fairly significant cost savings over MS SQL Server. I feel especially smug about my decision because PostgreSQL is getting ready to beta their 7.2 version which removes my last major problem with PostgreSQL, a vacuum will no longer require an exclusive lock on the table. Now I can use PostgreSQL in more demanding projects where having tables unavailable, if only for a moment, is unacceptable.
Could I have accomplished the same thing with MS SQL Server and Microsoft's development tools? Sure I could have. However, PostgreSQL, and the other Open Source tools I use, did the job for less money. More importantly, my PostgreSQL machines are completely off Microsoft's upgrade treadmill. I don't have to worry about how Microsoft is going to change their licensing agreements. Upgrades are free, and I have the choice of several organizations for support.
If you really believe that price is not a factor, then I have some software to sell you :).
Microsoft haters still have something to worry about. The company operates with a 40% profit margin. Only the mob and the phone company can get away with that kind of margin.
What this means is that Microsoft could substantially reduce all their prices and still make a reasonable margin - one comparable to other companies like AOL whose margin is 1%.
All Microsoft really needs to do as free competition arises is reduce price structure enough to keep the free solutions out because it costs to much to switch. This cost of re-tooling will ring true with CTOs, and they will be quite happy to keep paying what they've been paying.
However, Microsoft wants it all. The new licensing strategy with XP intends to increase company gross by 60% over the next 5 years or so. Or kill it, one of the two. But a monster with 30 BILLION dollars hard cash in the bank is pretty hard to kill. They can come back failure after failure if necessary, and still buy all their competitors.
As to the credibility of the story, I find it entirely believable. One of the large issues is that the story compares fairly incompetent NT engineers with competent linux ones. Even so, server administration requires much less admin time on linux - we estimate it is a 3 to 1 difference.
I was wondering about this....
So.. with Redhat as a possibility, gee, golly, whiz.. we'll.. not change anything and see what happens.
That's a *lot* less enthusiastic than "Format the window boxes! Full steam ahead!" which had been implied.
So they're using RH some.. That's good.. but.. So?
I'm waiting for them to *junk* Windows (I've considered doing the Dark Route, trying to get into management and doing that.
*then* I'm interested. Until then its a story about "Look how crappy Microsoft treats us"...
Addison
I think that what brings MicroSquish down won't be the antitrust litigation, it will be case after case of NT collapsing under its own weight.
I can't wait for the job ads to start saying: "NT sysadmin needed: Must know Linux and Samba."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
dlb, we must have very different support needs. Microsoft has never been able to help my company with Windows operating system problems. They never know the answers, and can't find them. True, we only call with difficult problems.
My experience has been identical to that discussed in the article published by the Boston Mac User's Group (BMUG) about who is better at answering Microsoft product technical support calls: Microsoft Technical Support, or The Psychic Friends Network? You can read it at http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html
Bush's education improvements were
On a server? What the @#$#@* is that doing on a server?
And that's not true. While true that bad drivers don't help - plenty of crashes have come from NT itself.Not knowing any percentage, I won't be so asinine as to make one up, but its far far more than .01, in my experience.
Addison
I used NDS years ago - it was awesome. I couldn't believe it when the company I was consulting for decided to replace their fast, easy to manage, reliable network with NT.
It was surreal actually - my assistant and I - that's right, two people - managed a network of about 3000 desktops, three locations, and half a dozen servers (plus these horrible cc-mail "servers" that took up most of our time - really they were client PC's running a cheesy routing application). We did everything from backups to managing users, reseting passwords, etc.
It took a team of consultants (Anderson - bright guys, but brainwashed by MS) about six months to replace the thing with about a dozen massive NT boxes. Their uptime and performance was horrible even though they had more and better hardware, plus it was a nightmare to administer.
Anyway, that's all totally off-topic. NDS really was awesome - a pleasure to administer. Even years later I've yet to see anything that comes close in terms of management and scalability. Unfortunately I don't think it has a future. Novell once had a dominent marketshare in file & print servers and they squandered it through mis-management. Still, if you don't mind the risk that the product will disappear, I'm sure current versions of NDS are even better (I stopped using Novell around the time 4.1 came out).
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
That's not true. Having been in 1 meeting (too many) with Microsoft licensing, that's a reasonable sounding point. With more than 1 server, they want per-seat checks on EVERY server, to be CERTAIN you aren't cheating.
Secondly, the idea that after 'two or three years' the initial two multiprocessor servers should still be adequate for the 2000 concurrent users is ridiculous.
Boy, do I agree. They should last at least 3-4. At least my (Novell/Linux/Solaris/Irix) ones do. Only ones that don't.. are running NT.
How is this the fault of the OS? Because NT needs a lot *more* horsepower for the same tasks. Lots and lots more. Sure, today, Intel (or AMD) can keep up with them. We used to joke that 2 years after release, Intel would put out a chip that would begin to run Redmond stuff fast enough. Intel and AMD outpaced the software guys, now.
I've had 60 mHz server chug along for years and years with Novell, no complaints, no need to speed up, because CPU wasn't the issue. (Disk IO finally became the greatest problem, 4 years down the road).
Right now, I'm adminning a 3-year old Solaris box, dual 200-somethings... and its not bogged down or bothered in the slightest. Outside this area, a bunch of NT boxes are being swapped in the rack - they're 2 years old and they need upgrades.
(To make an absolutely honest comparision, you need to know the loads and jobs, etc. But I've seen similar, NT having to be upgraded much more often than the competition.)
In the same paragraph, the author states that the failure of redundant servers was causing increased maintenance costs, and once again this was somehow caused by NT. First, the multiple servers weren't installed to be redundant - they were installed to handle separate functions, i.e., mail / file / print. What synchronization is required
You got confused. They seperated out to seperate machines and THEN had failovers for THEM (6 total for the example). Then when they'd failover, keeping them synced was a problem. Seen something like that, trying to do NT clustering. Lots and lots of time spent trying to keep it up, and running, and per spec. (The claim was that it would *Reduce* the hours needed, remember?)
Addison
If it's dodgy video drivers it pretty much MS fault, with NT 4 they moved them into kernel space ratrher than user space, just to speed up the video...
Well, good for NT workstation I supose, but completely uneccessary on a server.
mind you also doubt the down every 10th day. Sure NT4 isn't the most stable thing, but it isn't that bad. My old job had their server running for maybe 30 - 150 days between crashes/reboots.
IMHO, Linux do handle heavy load far better than NT4 though, dunno about win2k..
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
Yes, but organized religion has been saying that for thousands of years... (why do I feel like I should be posting this on kuro5hin?)
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
Last week I became a Tech guy at my school,
they called me 3 days before it started, and asked me to help setup 80 new computers.
While I was putting Windows on a few, I setup Linux on one, and showed it to the tech director.
He was really impressed, and now I get to setup 2 labs of 30 computers apiece, and find out what happens from there.
I don't understand this, dlb. Why not just contract with one of the many Linux support companies, like Red Hat?
Bush's education improvements were
They did fiddle with the NT by appling patches. Through it was exactly every 10 days, just seamed like every ten days. =)
The journey is better then the end.
One of the 'hidden' costs of using MS products is the amount of time & resources spent simply staying current, in case of the feared 'surprise Audit' where MS basically threatens to ruin you if they so much as find one license out of order.
IT's not the cost of the OS for each workstation... it's the recurring costs in upgrading, new licensing schemes, auditing...
Plus rediculous non-recyclable licences such as those for Terminal Services (From what I recall, if you license one workstatoin to use them, you can't later move it to a new one if tha tworkstation breaks)
Network installation? SUre, it can be done.. but nothing like what you can accomplish simply and easily and *logically* with a unix network.
Definitely! Thank you for saying that.
Bush's education improvements were
Apparently all BSOD's are NT's fault
Back in about 1999, Infoworld published a Microsoft study determining the causes of NT4 failures. "Internal Failure" ranked almost as high as "Third Party Driver". As someone who did production NT admin from 3.5 to about NT4 SP4, this definately lines up with experience that the early NT4 releases had LOTS of problems.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If an NT kernel based OS freezes, it's most likely due to hardware. I'd go for the videocard since you mention a webbrowser, which does different things than normal programs when it comes to rendering. Get hte latest detonator drivers for win2k from nvidia's website.
I've a dual p3-933 on a VP6 board with win2k. Due to some via problems it hanged sometimes, also nvidia's drivers weren't up to par. But since a month or so I'm running hte latest driverupdates and everything is rocksolid.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
My first job I was tech support for Win98. Our domain was NT and exchange for email. The admins were new and installed exchange on the pdc. The system used to crash monthly. A few times it wiped out people's email completely.
Second job I was tech support for NT and some sys admin. We were all on NT. The biggest problem we had was properly formatted printing. Never figured it out. Print server used to crash every few weeks, but it was a ppro with 32MB RAM. Ironically it crashed when people sent huge 30MB ppt presentations to it. Exchange stayed up for months at a time. 2000 is great. Very stable. A compaq desktop that we used as a server because of lack of funds stayed up for six months with one or two reboots.
Present job I'm email admin and I have 3 exchange servers. In two months only time we rebooted was when we upgraded AV software and went to Exchange SP4.
The secret with NT is one server, one app. More than one network service one a server is OK, aka WINS, DNS, DHCP. My one experience with PSS was great. The engineer walked me through the solution step by step. NT is not UNIX, but it's OK for LAN's. Exchange is great. After a few power outages we thought our database was screwed for sure, but isinteg later it worked fine.
I was thinking the same thing. What this "story" smells of is a PR job by Red Hat. Notice how Red Hat are saints, and not a whiff of any other Linux vendors (or IBM, or whoever)?
I am VERY surprised to see this type of writeup at Anandtech. I am used to detailed, objective testing, and the occasional factual commentary that at least resembles journalism. This is a piece of fluff that would get laughed off my desk if I were in a similar position as this mysterious company.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
THe main problem with IIS and IIS based apps is that they leak memory (IIS does that). So if yuo have some webapplications running, with a lot of visitors daily, the memory gets pretty low. (I've experienced similar stuff on apache powered sites, why are webservers so crappy?).
You don't have to reboot however. Just stop / start the W3svc and you're mem is freed. (Or kill the inetserv.exe process when you stopped the service). Can be done in 10 seconds. In fact, in win2k, when you kill inetserv (the IIS main process) it's restarted automatically (hehe, crashproof).
This way I keep up my NT based webservers for months. Once in a while they have to reboot due to security patches, but that's all.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
(Save the MCSE jokes, plz)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
What is that supposed to mean? Is the idea that morality is somehow inate, and any examination of it demonstrates that you are somehow lacking, or is the statement supposed to be ironic or something?
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Why are you people so skeptical?
I've noticed that a lot of posters to this thread seem to have the opinion that article is a fairy tale. Anandtech seems to me to have a reputation for impartiality, their hardware reveiws are quite thourough and unbiased as far as I can see.
What you are seeing is the classic strategy of Microsoft shills and lackeys on slashdot using standard astroturfing techniques to slant the apparent tone of the conversation in a manner which is conducive to their PR goals. This has been followed by a few more reasonable people who have either been taken in by the "reasonable" tone of skepticism expressed (many astroturfing efforts have been laughed out of here and elsewhere because of the ludricous stances they have taken, however, Microsoft shills and PR-consultants have grown more subtle and clever over time, and have refined their astroturfing techniques quite a bit), or are falling prey to the misguided desire to appear more thoughtful by expressing skepticism, whether or not it is at all well founded.
As someone who has helped numerous companies, including my current employer, switch wholesale to GNU/Linux on both the desktop and server side I can say that the story rings very true. It should also be pointed out that there are numerous, confirmed instances of Microsoft threatening their customers with inflated licensing fees, expensive license audits, etc. in retaliation for deploying a competitor's product in-house. This sort of behavior was particularly common during the early Internet Explorer vs. Netscape struggle, and is playing no small part in the ongoing DOJ v Microsoft anti-trust trial. I suspect only the most ardent Microsoft apologist or supporter would have any shred of doubt as to the likelihood that such tactics will almost certainly be turned against firms trying to make the transition from Windows to GNU/Linux, and until a company is fully weaned from Microsoft (and these transitions can take months or even years, depending on the complexity and entrenchment of the existing legacy systems) they are vulnerable to this sort of retaliation.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
hey.
i have a friend who works for an ibm company called tivoli. they have alot of products but one of the cool things they do is push applications to workstations. so if you have 7k workstations and a couple servers. you install the client on the workstations and your server can push software to them. this is expensive but possible in windows.
btw tivoli also works under linux. i've never used it but my friend says they do alot of their development under linux.
-- john
I work for a large consulting firm, and I think the real paradigm shift will occur when large third-party consulting firms start considering Linux as a viable option.
Unfortunately, in the business world where the most "technical" users wouldn't know C from Perl and have never heard of "The Registry", changes like this are all but impossible. At this time, I still believe Linux is the realm of geeks and engineers.... but never give up the fight!!
But you can't undercut 0 or you'll get a divide by 0 error (or Overflow in Visual Basic!?! - how retarded is that???).
Speaking purely of licensing, MS can never undercut free apps. That's one reason why they've been looking to other revenue sources.
Developers: We can use your help.
Well put, and largely accurate.
Just in case nobody has posted this yet, the author of the article at Anandtech explains that there's an NDA in force. It'll be eighteen months before he can reveal the name of the company. You'll have to search for "Paul Sullivan" to see his comment.
Failure is its own reward.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I'm not using Exchange, I'm using IMail, just like I wrote. And I have 24,000 POP3/IMAP accounts on a single box. It has 4 stripped/mirrored cheetas for hard drive space, 72 gigs of space. This is not a problemo
Oh, I'm sorry , I forgot this is Slashdot Where it's IMPOSSIBLE for a MS product to do well and only linux is to be worshipped. Silly me for talking about a real first hand experience that is actually positive about a MS product.
Troll? flamebait? Only if you don't care for facts and only care for blind worship of linus.
24K accounts on Exchange.
Absolutely!
Have seen it done with more. But not on one box, doh, of course. However, I wasn't talking about Exchange, I'm using IMail and, yes, I have 24,000 POP3/IMAP account on a single server.
Exchange can't handle it? Yea right. Please. We've got an E2K box in our data center where we're migrating all of those users to, about 1000 per 2 weeks. So far we have 8400 on 3 boxes, one HTTP/POP3 front end and two back end. So far no problems at all. I suspect you are talking about Exchange 5.5 - 2000 didn't even hardly blip at 4K.
The article is fake, anandtech does this a lot.
I was replying to his comment that he thinks that 1 pentium class server could replace a 6 server NT cluster
But what if your total workload is small enough to be handled by a single box? If, as the article states, such functions as mail, print, and file serving need to be handled by separate dedicated machines for reasons of stability, not performance, then that puts a lower bound on the number of servers you need to have ([#server machines] >= [# server applications] -- and presumably database and web serving would be boxes #4 and #5), no matter how small the total workload actually is.
That would seem to significantly raise the entry-level price point for small shops whose total workload would otherwise be nowhere near the capacity of even a single box.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Are you a websurfer/email reader/office program user?
If so, Linux is right there, right now, and you don't even have to hunt down anything. If you start with Mandrake (buy the powerpack edition just for fun) you will be ready to rock right after the install is done. No joke.
Are you a gamer?
If so, you are generally locked out of the latest 3D gorefests, unless you dual-boot. However, this doesn't mean you have no games- Loki has many decent and recent offerings, and there are many highly appealing games that just aren't in the EB shelves. The real classics are certainly available for Linux, as well- they're either remade from scratch (i.e. freeciv) or ported (loki's work.)
Note also that many gaming companies are considering Linux ports, often at the behest of their own developers.
Are you a graphic designer?
High end graphics are a niche, and to write them for Linux means that the authors must target a niche of a niche. This having been said, there are solutions.
When speaking of Linux graphics, you can't get away without mentioning the GIMP. Some people will swear is as good as Photoshop, and for most people (i.e. 99% of the folks that would warez it!) it really is. However, if you do prepress work, you will run into limitations very quickly (not the least of which is the total lack of CMYK/process color support!) The GIMP is designed for screen-target, RGB photo editing and web graphics design. You can try the GIMP out on windows, too, if you want.
Corel makes a set of Linux graphics tools, matching their Windows lineup. I haven't had the cash to get the whole enchilada yet, but I have used the freely available Photo-Paint they offer. I found it to be rather sluggish, but workable, which is why I am mulling the purchase of the whole suite (at $300 last I checked.)
I hear there is another company working on an Illustrator/Quark combo clone for Linux (based on something for Irix, IIRC.) We shall see.
3D graphics are advancing quite nicely on Linux, with major 3D artists already beginning to move to Linux due to hardware cost issues. If you want to just fiddle around in 3D, Blender can be a nice tool. It's free, but very difficult to figure out at first.
Overall, graphics is one arena to watch closely under Linux. The expert users that often populate the graphics crowd are really looking hard at Linux for the future.
To conclude, Linux is at the point where the normal user can comfortable enjoy it, and more specialized users are moving in.
If you aren't sure, just remember that you can always dualboot and learn while retaining your Windows capabilities as you normally would.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
If you have questions read what he has to say Anandtech forum
"think of it as evolution in action"
I see that as the given for updating hoards of WinNT boxen all the time "use a script."
Back in days of old when I was young and foolish I thought, "what can it hurt, I'll add the local users to the admin group on their boxes." Yes yes, if you've done it or seen somebody do you it you're laughing at me right now. That's fine. So the net became this big thing and everyone needed a browser on their desktop and email attachments were great and look at all the things people send me that I can double click!
Yeah, moral of story: Domain users are now part of the local "users" group on all my NT boxes. Oh, and NT really needs it's own version of su.
Cheers, - RLJ
Agreed. The entire problem that the company in the article faced was NOT caused by their software selection or their NOS. It was caused because they did not employ an internal DIT-styled position or internal technical consultant. They have nobody in that company to explain the situation from a 3rd-person perspective. Its just a bunch of execs listening to MS FUD on one side and RedHat FUD on the other side.
Won't go with AD because the PDC/BDC model wasn't effective? Yah, that makes a ton of since... MS isn't actually trying to IMPROVE their scalability. They just want you to buy into a new technology. Bah, those stingy execs need to get a clue and hire some more knowledgable (and costly) IT people. The tiny increase in salary will get them a tremendous boost in productivity and save them a ton of money in the long run.
Eventually, RedHat will screw them over and they'll move on to another outsourced consulting company.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
Back in days of old when I was young and foolish I thought, "what can it hurt, I'll add the local users to the admin group on their boxes." Yes yes, if you've done it or seen somebody do you it you're laughing at me right now. That's fine. So the net became this big thing and everyone needed a browser on their desktop and email attachments were great and look at all the things people send me that I can double click!
Right. But you don't have viable options on NT. Though you could give non-admins the right to install software or use SMS (another expensive, MS product).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Actually, you're in luck. IANANTG (I am not an NT guru), but the NT 4 Resource Kit has the Switch User (SU) utility. It does what you'd expect --- you run it off the command line, and you can either have it give you an administrator-privilege window, or you can specify an app (SU user program_name domain_name).
Heh, I got this out of and old copy of Internet Security Advisor Magazine I picked up at CA World last year here in New Orleans (no, I didn't pay for the conference, I um, "visited" the show).
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Hi!
I appreciate your advice--but I must disagree. The differences between SQL Server 6.5 and SQL Server 7.0 are substantial--and very significant. There are significant performance and feature improvements in SQL Server 7.0 (and 2000) that make a very compelling case for upgrading 6.5 installations to 7.0.
Don't let the version numbers mislead you--SQL Server 6.5 is the last version of the source code developed by Sybase and jointly marketed with Microsoft. When Microsoft and Sybase "divorced" back in the '90s MS set about creating a completely new database product. Because of contractual limitations they continued evolutionary development of SQL Server 6.0 and 6.5--while building the new product (7.0) and deploying it internally within Microsoft.
SQL Server 7.0 is really a 1.0 product. It is a complete, from-the-ground-up rewrite of SQL Server. And while a lot of 1.0 Microsoft products are pretty dreadful (well, okay, practically all 1.0 Microsoft products are dreadful), SQL Server 7.0 positively rocks.
For starters, SQL Server does not require a fixed disk partition anymore--so resizing your database is no big deal. (We typically configure them to auto-grow, so we don't have to spend a lot of time monitoring available space.) The query optimization is dramatically enhanced. In 6.5 and earlier (and most competitive databases) the query optimizer quits when you add a fourth table to an INNER JOIN. In 7.0 and higher the query optimizer is substantially more robust--you can create JOINs with dozens of tables, review the execution plan, provide optimizer hints (hint: don't--the optimizer is very smart), and really get a handle on exactly what's going on. For data warehouse applications the query optimizer and query performance in general--alone--make upgrading from 6.5 a very good idea.
Another compelling feature is scalability: 7.0 handles very large tables, including full-text indexing, without breathing hard. We do a lot of performance testing on our projects--we have found performance testing with SQL Server 7.0 to be difficult because the database generally handles requests faster than we can create them. It takes serious work to maintain multiple SQL Server 7.0 connections from a single test machine--and if we're using a pool manager (such as COM+) we can run test scripts from more than a dozen machines (simulating hundreds of users) and still share a single connection.
In short, performance of SQL Server 7.0 is extremely good.
SQL Server 2000 is also good stuff--in particular, I really like the new User-Defined Functions (a feature Oracle has had for years). But for solutions that have already been written for SQL Server 7.0 (that is, where we aren't going to do any new work, so UDFs aren't an issue) there's no compelling case to make the move.
Except Microsoft holding the "Software Assurance" gun to my head....
This is great, if you can stand up and say "Hey, everything will now be Win2000. if you dont like it then leave..." in a mixed environment the lowest common denominator wins. I have 2.5 million dollars worth of ad insertion gear (Mpeg2 playback units. each decoding and displaying 24 seperate simultanious(sp?) higher than DVD quality video.) that CANNOT be migrated to Windows 2000. the company said ..."Nope we aint gonna do it, W2K has way too much overhead and offeres nothing for the playback units." Basically, I was told that until all hardware is upgraded to PIII866(minimum) machines and newer multi-mpeg decoders that are supported under w2k (Which was when hell freezes from what a tech told me) they aren't even going to start development on a W2K version. and a very large number of vertical hardware and software companies are doing this.
.the others act as standby...but outside attacks are easy to avoid....)
So we're stuck. Domain based security, The PDC is nt4.0 and the BDC's. W2k CANNOT be locked down in this situation.... I know, I asked MS, techrepublic, everyone has offered solutions for big $$$ but it comes to one point. as long as there is 1 Nt4.0 machine in the network W2K security additions are nullified... which is only an annoyance to me. If the building is infiltrated then yes, the evil hackers will get me... but they are not getting past the firewalls, nor the rotating POP.. (daily, our POP roatates from one geographical location to another..
My biggest problem is sales people.... install AOL on their laptop, and management will not fire them even if they ignore company policy... hey they're making the money not the IT department...
The best fun is that corperate is asking us to migrate whatever we can to linux... nothing like having money tight to get feet in the door!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The warning is actually on MS's web page.. (Somewhere, not sure where, but I heard it 2nd hand...)
Also, EZ-CD creator 5 will work with Win2000/XP correctly, if you do NOT install anything except just the EZ-CD Creator 5 application. The other apps it comes with, is what is screwing up the file system. I forget which one, but I think its take two... And the patch doesn't work... I haven't tried it on 2000 this way, but at work, it works fine with XP this way...
As a side note, you can hardly get mad at MS for letting Roxio write POS drivers. I mean, I'm sure more people would get pissed at MS, if they started telling companies who can and can't write software...
Well, that's another damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't thing then. If they don't move the video drivers into system space, they get yelled at because the performance sucks. If they do, then video driver crashes are OBVIOUSLY MS's fault...
And also, you can't compare linux NOW to NT4... Back when Linux was compared to NT4 in '99, NT4 creamed linux. However now linux is MUCH better, and I haven't been able to find any conclusive comparisons between linux vs 2k at all, so I really can't say.
If God gave us curiosity
Dude, thats my point. IMail isn't 1/100th of the load on a server that Exchange is. Thats like saying NT is stable because I can run Solitaire for months on end and not have it blow up.
true, but why didn' tthey fork the source in to a desktop version and a server version. granted, they would have to deal with two different sources and so, maybe not defendable from an economic point of view, but from aesthetic point of view it would have been much better. mind you, my old company always ran the servers with the default MS provided driver, very crap - yes, but it ought to be fairly well tested!
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }